Conversions, Tracking & Scores

This is the largest section of the library and the one where over-claiming is easiest. Google hands out ratings for ad strength, optimisation, quality and page speed, and a Conversions column that quietly decides what the bidding aims at. Each of those numbers is real, and each answers a narrower question than the one people ask of it. This section reads them one at a time. It is written for the person who has to stand behind the numbers: a marketing director who presents results to a board and needs them to survive a second look, a commercial director who reconciles platform figures against the CRM every month, or an independent consultant who has to tell a client which dashboards are measuring the business and which are measuring the tool.

The question this section answers

The buyer question is whether you can trust what the platform tells you happened. That splits into three. What counts as a conversion, and therefore what the bidding aims at. Whether the scores Google assigns predict anything about results. And how you reconcile the number on the platform with the number in your own system.

The reading order matters more here than in the other sections, because the later studies only make sense once the counting rule is settled. A score that predicts nothing is a puzzle until you know what it was computed from. A gap between two systems is a mystery until you know what counted and how often. So start with counting, then goals, then scores, then the numbers that arrive in reports, and finish with the report itself.

How to read it, in order

• What the column your bidding actually uses counts as a conversion comes first, because everything downstream depends on the counting rule in force.
• Which conversion goal a campaign is really bidding towards comes next, and it is the shortest route from settings to the behaviour you are paying for.
• Whether the optimisation score tracks results is the study to read before you quote any score in a board pack.
• How to reconcile Google Ads with your CRM takes the argument outside the platform, where the disagreements that matter usually sit.
• Which of Google's own scores moves results and which do not closes the loop on the ratings the interface hands you.

What this section will not do for you

It will not give you a benchmark to aim at, because a single tidy benchmark is exactly what this section exists to take apart. It does not cover the benchmarks study, the click-through rate work or the ad strength ratings in detail, even though they sit in the same list below. What it gives you is a defensible answer to the question of whether a number is right, which is the only honest place a reporting conversation can start. The account management section covers what to ask for when you want the change history, and the wasted spend section covers what to do once you trust the conversions you are counting.